Funding surveydown for community development

[jhelvy]

Description

This project has reached a level of momentum that we felt we should consider applying for funding to continue building out the community of users and developers. This discussion is an effort to try and transparently search for funding opportunities that we might consider applying for. I would appreciate any thoughts / suggestions anyone out there has on this topic. Feel free to comment on funding opportunities that you might know of and / or your thoughts on what we should be focused on. If you have any suggestions on how we might go about this endeavor (obtaining funding or building a community), please feel free to let us know here!

To get us started, here's a list of opportunities to consider:

• NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE)
• NSF The Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (Safe-OSE)
• NSF CyberInfrastructure for Public Access and Open Science (CI PAOS)
• NIH Building Sustainable Software Tools for Open Science (R03 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
• NIH Research Software Engineer (RSE) Award (R50 Clinical Trials Not Allowed)
• NASA Open Science Funding Opportunities
• The Navigation Fund: Open Science
• Software Sustainability Institute (they have a research software healthcheck program that might be helpful).
• Invest in Open Infrastructure

[jhelvy]

Looking at these options, I think the Navigation Fund and the NIH program look like potentially good fits for actually continuing the software development. The Navigation Fund has a "introduce yourself" page where I think we could write a compelling narrative to introduce surveydown. I might try this after we get a draft paper written.

The NSF POSE program I see as a better fit for supporting the build out of the community of users / devs. I would also see this as an important opportunity that surveydown might be well-suited for.

[david-lippert-gwu]

I really like having this discussion in the open. Great idea.

The GW OSPO is excited to support surveydown. Here are some additional resources and ideas that we hope are helpful.

Community building

• github has some nice open source guides to support projects that are looking to grow
• This repo-scaffolder/maturity-model-tiers matrix has a nice view of various markdown files that are relevant for projects based on their maturity.
• This All Contributors Bot is a great way to automate the recognition of all contributors (including non coders) who are supporting your community.

Internally at GW I plan to reach out to IT and the Research Technology Services teams to see if they are able to join the surveydown community to ensure there is a plan to support and sustain your project as it becomes more mature. Also, the OSPO is excited to partner with your team on the NSF or other grants.

Externally, I plan to talk with other universities and research entities involved in the CURIOSS (Academic OSPO network) to see if they might be interested in also joining the surveydown community.